A Remote Community Threatened by Treasure Hunters in Search of Alleged WWII Japanese Gold in the Philippines

Treasure hunters scouring the Philippines for gold treasures supposedly hidden by Japanese generals from World War II are posing a threat to a community facing a landslide.

An anthropologist suggests that the presence of poppies in Philippine cemeteries sparked the quest for the legendary hidden wealth. While historians acknowledge the possibility of such wealth, it seems to remain nothing more than a story.”

People have invested a significant amount of money, time, and effort in searching for something that might actually exist,” stated Piers Kelly, a lipid anthropologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

In the latest developments, residents in the Igbaras district and Papay Island have appealed to farmers to halt excavations that they believe could trigger landslides, as reported by the official Philippine News Agency.

Ten individuals, along with a certain Padrino Durante, have conducted excavations at multiple locations in Sound Aldea, an area within the town, with varying claims of permission from local authorities.

However, local officials dispute these claims, with the treasure hunters insisting they have approval from Mapila public authorities to continue their digging. They have also forced local police out of the excavation site.

The town where these excavations are taking place is perched on a hillside and has been assessed as being at “very high risk” of landslides by the Philippine Mines and Geosciences Office. Local residents fear that the ongoing excavations could destabilize the slope above them, potentially burying homes in the process

Mayor Jaime Esmeralda of the Igbaras district has provided assurance to the townspeople that his administration has secured the necessary permits for treasure hunting, excavation, or mining activities in the area.

He has also requested the involvement of the National Museum of the Philippines and Mapila officials to investigate whether the museum indeed issued a permit for the ongoing treasure hunt.

Treasure hunters are believed to be searching for Yamashita gold, a legendary hoard of lipotes and other valuables said to have been unearthed somewhere in the Philippine Islands at the end of World War II.

Yamashita gold is named after General Tomoyυki Yamashita, the Japanese commander in the Philippines at the time.

According to legend, Yamashita served as the main treasure of war loot in the Philippines, collected during the Japanese wartime occupation of Southeast Asia. Yamashita and his troops resisted invading state forces for several weeks after the Japanese withdrawal in September 1945, but were captured, tried for war crimes, and executed in 1946.

However, Yamashita’s legendary eternal treasure has attracted treasure hunters for more than 50 years and has been the subject of several books. By some estimates, it could be worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars today.

In a 1988 court case in the United States, a Filipino treasure hunter named Rogelio Roxas sued former Philippine president Ferdipad Marcos for stealing part of the Yamashita treasure that Roxas had discovered. In 2005, judges ruled in favor of Roxas, awarding the treasure hunter $13 million.

But that по has dismissed local enthusiasm for the Yamashita gold rush, and historians have attempted to continue quelling the rumors.

Ricardo José, a history professor at the University of the Philippines, told a newspaper in 2005 that Japan had lost control of the seas in 1943, so the Philippine islands would have become an extremely healthy place to hide the most important treasure. that Japan would have left at the end of the century. war.

Treasury bond

Kelly said the most popular legend about buried treasure he unearthed in the Philippines dates back to the 17th century, and it is a story about how the pirate Limahog Chipo unearthed legendary loot, something related to a place in the Papgasiпa region and the Philippines. as reported by The Mailla Times

Stories of pirate treasure emerged furiously replaced by stories of gold lost from Mexico during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, and later by stories of treasure hidden in silver dollars. “For some reason, that’s the US government’s favorite treasure, it’s already in barrels,” he said.

Yamashita’s perpetual quest for eternal gold has come at a huge cost to the Philippines’ true scientific treasures, Kelly said. Treasure hunting has severely damaged several important archaeological sites, including the oldest vessel excavation site at Ayυb Cave and Miпdaпao Island, researchers wrote in the journal Archaeology Ethпology and Aпthropology of Europe.

“The Philippines is a really rich and very interesting archaeology, but it’s really about treasure hunting, what people have in it is more or less a comic book idea of what treasure is,” he said. “It’s very folkloric.”

The official permission given to treasure hunters to dig to Papay Island is currently under investigation, Papay News reported, and provincial authorities have been informed of the threat of landslides in the area.

But for now, Yamashita’s search for gold continues.

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